West Houston Campus Seeks the Right Buyer
The West Houston Campus represents a corporate headquarters campus or multi-tenant office complex, or a large-scale mixed-use development in an area with limited tracts available for future development.
HOUSTON—The 1.3-million-square-foot West Houston Campus in the Energy Corridor was designed and built by ConocoPhillips in 1984. It was sold to Occidental Petroleum in 2019 before The Howard Hughes Corporation purchased it later in the year in a $565 million portfolio buy.
Today, the campus is being marketed by CBRE in collaboration with Howard Hughes. The main reason the firm is selling the asset is because the West Houston campus is not in its core asset class of master-planned communities. And, Howard Hughes is on a cost reduction program and the campus is not part of its corporate mandate, GlobeSt.com learns in this exclusive.
“The campus was state of the art when it was built and the bones are extremely good,” Paul Layne, CEO of The Howard Hughes Corporation, tells GlobeSt.com. “The efficient and sustainable Japanese floating village design of 1.3 million square feet would work wonderfully as a corporate campus of any type, for a company that’s looking for a deal of a lifetime. This presents an opportunity for companies from high-tax states to come to Houston’s I-10/Energy Corridor and utilize the existing facility or improve it. The entire 1.3 million square feet is ready to be built out to what a tenant would want in a customized way.”
As Layne points out, the West Houston Campus could accommodate a corporate headquarters campus or multi-tenant office complex or presents an opportunity for a large-scale mixed-use development in an area with limited future development tracts. The property’s visibility and favorable ingress/egress are positioned for office, multifamily, retail and hospitality uses.
The elevated setting is located on 63 developable acres. The corporate campus comprises 17 individual three-story buildings with interconnecting walkways and bridges, nine acres of lakes and 24 landscaped acres. It has a conference center and wellness facilities, two-story fitness center, basketball court, group exercise rooms, Olympic-sized pool, outdoor soccer field and running trail.
The Energy Corridor is Houston’s second-largest employment center, home to a significant number of global companies and facilities such as BP, ConocoPhillips, MD Anderson, Methodist Hospital, Shell, Sysco Foods, TechnipFMC, Texas Children’s Hospital and Wood Group, among others. This critical mass in energy, technology and other industries, coupled with the desirable demographic population to both the east and west, ensures the Energy Corridor’s long-term viability across all uses.
“The Houston market, with its low-cost, tax-friendly, pro-business environment that offers a high-quality of life, has historically experienced steady levels of population and employment growth during all economic cycles,” Layne tells GlobeSt.com. “With low-cost housing and open spaces, this campus fits the bill and would be the perfect home for the right buyer.”
Especially in this time of the pandemic, there are features that make this a viable opportunity for companies considering issues of employee health and wellness, safety, and quality of work-life, according to The Howard Hughes Corporation. These design advantages over traditional urban office space have helped the West Houston Campus remain operational during the pandemic.
- A low-rise layout decreases office density and is easier to navigate without frequent elevator use, greatly reducing or eliminating the common elevator queues in office towers
- A wide second-story walking spine provides ample space to create designated walking lanes in each direction, allowing for better social distancing
- The campus’ location means almost all employees will drive their own vehicles instead of using crowded public transportation
- Green spaces, lake and outdoor walkways provide a calming environment for employees and provide additional access to walking space to further encourage social distancing
- Abundant natural light throughout the campus’ indoor space helps improve mood and productivity
“Wellness was a hot topic before COVID and this campus is set up for the post-COVID world,” Jim Carman, president of the Houston region of The Howard Hughes Corporation, tells GlobeSt.com. “The way you enter on level two, and the connection to walkways and bridges really eliminates elevators for one or two levels, which is safer during this distancing period.”